By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2  

Some years ago I ran into the former legal adviser to Jeane Kirkpatrick during the period she served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He recalled an odd experience he had in 1982 when she had returned to the office baffled after having been taken to lunch by her Argentine colleague at the U.N. She reported that at the end of every other sentence the Argentine Ambassador would pause dramatically and declare: "Malvinas! Malvinas!" What, Ambassador Kirkpatrick asked her adviser, was "Malvinas"?

Jeane Kirkpatrick was supposed to have been an expert on Argentina. The Argentine military regime, which she had defended, saw her as a friend. The Malvinas is of course the designation the Argentines use for the Falkland Islands in their dispute with the British over the sovereignty of the South Atlantic archipelago. Her lack of reaction was taken as a sign of U.S. approval for the invasion of the islands, which took place a week later.

I had witnessed a second missed message in 1981. My office at Columbia University was in the Research Institute on International Change founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who until January of that year had been the National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. We had a weekly seminar on international affairs and the speaker once was Benjamin Netanyahu. Quietly, in the course of responding to a question on another topic, he said that the Israelis intended to attack the Iraqi nuclear plant. He must have assumed the message would be passed on. But no one took note. Silence was interpreted as approval. A week later the Israeli did attack Iraq.

In September of last year an Israeli air strike destroyed a nuclear facility in Syria. International reaction was notable for its silence. Earlier this month the Israelis carried out a major military exercise in the eastern Mediterranean with more than 100 F-16 and F-15 fighters, refueling tankers and helicopter rescue backups. An operation on that scale was hardly a secret to anyone and would have required over-flight permission from Turkey and Greece. It was clearly a simulation of an attack on Iran's uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.

The cautious director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, was sufficiently concerned about the Israeli operation to warn that an attack on Iran would turn the Middle East "into a ball of fire."

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper